together in an integrated whole by the creativity of the artist,
an operation that T. S. Eliot famously called “the amalgama-
tion of disparate experience.”^6 Eliot came in contact with mu-
sical theatre by way of Joseph Kerman, whose influential Opera
as Dramawas solidly based on the new criticism, said nothing
at all about musical comedy, and took Wagner and the theory
of unity as crucial concerns.^7 Other influential books about
drama at mid-century were Eric Bentley’s The Playwright as
Thinkerand Francis Fergusson’s The Idea of a Theater. Bentley
took special delight in castigating the musical as “vacuous”
(Oklahoma!) and half-educated (One Touch of Venus). Song and
dance are only “embellishments” to drama, said Bentley, whose
bias in favor of organic wholeness has a Wagnerian edge:
“Every good play has a rhythmic structure and a symphonic
unity.” Indeed, Wagner was one of Bentley’s four heroes of
modern drama, along with Ibsen, Shaw, and Strindberg (al-
though Bentley had a sharp eye for false Wagnerianism, too).
In The Idea of a Theater, Fergusson wrote at length about the
Aristotelian “unity of action,” ignored the musical, and de-
voted a chapter to Tristan und Isolde.^8
Thus the best books on drama at midcentury took Wagner
seriously and regarded him as a key figure whose influence
extended beyond opera to nonmusical drama. They also dis-
regarded the musical, a type of popular entertainment hardly
worth study when unity of action was the important dramatic
4 CHAPTER ONE
(^6) In his essay “The Metaphysical Poets” in Selected Essays, p. 247.
(^7) Kerman thought music a further intensification of poetry in the Eliot aes-
thetic: poetry was an enlargement of ordinary speech, creating nuances of feel-
ing and a heightened sensibility. Kerman accepted that theory of poetry and
argued for carrying it a step further into operatic music as an extension and
heightening of poetry, but for both Eliot and Kerman, the range of expression
was a unified continuum that gained its power by stretching into poetry (Eliot)
and into operatic music (Kerman). See Kerman, Opera as Drama.
(^8) For Bentley on unity, see Playwright as Thinker, p. 112. The remarks about
musicals are on pp. 6–8. Fergusson treats Tristanin chapter 3, on “univocal
form” in Wagner and Racine. The Wagnerian connection with the idea of in-
tegration in the musical is sharply presented in Most, Making Americans, p. 9
and p. 225n7.